Crusades

Crusading Vows and Privileges

Paul Crawford

Regardless of motivation, an individual underwent a specific ceremony before he could be considered a "crusader." The ceremony evolved somewhat over the centuries, but its general outlines remained the same. A would-be crusader sought out an ecclesiastical authority (a priest, bishop or higher cleric) and swore to carry out an armed "pilgrimage" in support of the Holy Places. He then usually received a cloth cross which he could place on his clothes to signify his new status.

Crusading vows were usually taken in response to official preaching of a crusade by licensed churchmen. They were supposed to be taken only by fighting men or those who could otherwise contribute to a military effort, and they were not to be taken without the permission of the crusader's wife, since his long absence would deprive her of what was delicately called "marital rights" (Pope Innocent III, in need of troops for his crusading proposals, changed this in the thirteenth century, but in doing so he violated longstanding Church tradition and the plain intentions of canon law).

The crusader's property and people were then placed under the protection of the Church, and he was to begin preparing to leave. If he did not discharge his vow within a certain period of time, he might be excommunicated by the church until he kept his word.

Crusaders were often offered an indulgence in return for participation in the hardships of a crusade. The indulgence was later seriously abused, and the word acquired a justifiably obnoxious connotation. But in the beginning it was another of those carefully thought out doctrinal innovations that attended the reforms of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

In brief, the indulgence assumed that if an individual were truly penitent for his sins, he might obtain remission or forgiveness for the temporal penalties of those sins by performing some arduous, virtuous or unpleasant task to compensate for them. This remission could apply to penalties imposed by the Church on earth (i.e., to penance prescribed for sin), and it might also apply to penalties imposed by the Church in the next world (i.e., to time spent in purgatory).

Most medieval people were deeply interested in their fate in the next world, and the indulgence was a powerful incentive to participate in crusades. It was especially effective amongst the very people whom the Church was trying to recruit: the baron who was a competent warrior but who had perhaps been applying that competence to unlawful targets such as other Christians and who, as a result, had a guilty conscience.

It should be noted, too, that crusaders did not take vows to "go on crusade." The very term crusade, in English or in any other language, is a much later invention. What we call "crusades," contemporaries knew as "pilgrimages" or even simply "journeys" ("iter" or "peregrinatio" in Latin, "pelerinage" in French).